Certificate remoting and recovery is a process for managing a certificate collection via a remote interface. In some situations, security certificates stored on a computer cannot be remotely administered. For example, certificates must be manually added, removed, or revoked by an administrator with physical access to the computer. Further, services executing on the computer may be unable to retrieve certificates needed to operate. For example, a federation service that validates transactions between two computers may be unable to retrieve a required authentication authority's security certificate. Thus, the conventional strategy is for an administrator to manually install and manage required certificates. This often causes problems because the conventional strategy does not allow efficient management of certificates across multiple computers. For example, an administrator may have to physically interact with computers in diverse geographic locations in order to make sure all have up-to-date certificates.